Bruce is amazing. There’s a smoldering
intensity that first drew me to Batman, and it doesn’t go away
when he gets home and takes off the mask. It does change form.
When it’s stopping crime, it’s dark, angry and powerful. But
when he’s starting something, it becomes sizzling,
dynamic, almost playful. He doesn’t say or do anything special,
but you can sense it, that inner core that burns so hot
as Batman, all that drive and focus and intensity. It’s just
being channeled into something more… lifesize. It’s really
something to see.

At least, it is when your eyes are open. That morning, it
started before my eyelids were open for business. I was dreaming
something about an email from Jason Blood, when that old tingle that used to
warn me when Batman was near pulled me right out of the dream into a quick
spooning hug—followed by a thigh slap and the morning version of the Bat-gravel
tickling my ear and telling me not to sleep in too late. Once I was up, he
visited me in the shower, which is always fun, and then suggested I wear a
t-shirt. I don’t usually go bare-armed in the cave; it’s pretty chilly. But
with all the work we’d be doing, I’d be sure to work up a sweat.

Something about his quiet excitement was contagious, and
for the first time in years I felt a flush: this silly, girlish glow warming my
cheeks. His impossibly understated yet impossibly intense focus that was so… so
Batman, it made me giddy as we went down to the cave. I didn’t know why
at first, but then, stepping off the final step, it hit me: he’d done this
before. That cave didn’t build itself; he made it. He decided he wanted a chem
lab and a gymnasium and a med bay. He chose what equipment to include. And I
couldn’t help but wonder if I was seeing into the past, if he was like this on
that first morning when he came down those stairs to start work setting up the
gym.

“First we’ll pick a spot,” he said—with a plan, as always.
“Then we’ll work on clearing the space for it, and once everything is in place,
we’ll recalibrate the holo-gens.”

I just nodded. The first time he brought me to the cave, I
couldn’t appreciate it. I really couldn’t begin to comprehend. I was
still reeling from becoming lovers, from “my name is Bruce,” from the words “I
love you,” from Batman’s voice coming from an unmasked face—from that face being
Bruce Wayne, no less, from… all of it. It was months—hell, it was
years—before I really understood what it meant that first time Bruce brought me
into the cave. And now, now he casually mentions recalibrating the holo-gens.

“Of course we wouldn’t have to move a thing if we put it
there,” he joked.

“Between the dinosaur’s legs? No.”

“Thought not.”

And the lip twitch. It was the only sign that he’d been
joking (and it’s amazing how many people don’t get his sense of humor that
way).

“What about over there, under the Joker card,” I pointed.

“Will make it difficult to get to the emergency generator.”

“What if… we put it right here?”

“It will block your old costume.”

“Let me finish. Put it right here in place of the costume
case, and put my old skirted costume…” I turned, “somewhere over there.”

He scowled like he was picturing it, then shook his head.

“I’d rather not move that particular case. There’s a nest
behind that stalactite. I’d rather not disturb anything the bats are used to.”

There was something about that scowl—the rooftop scowl—the
denial scowl. I looked behind me, up the path to the main cavern and his
seat at Workstation One. My costume was hardly in its direct line of sight, but
I knew from the nights I’d sat there that the splash of color was clear when you
glanced this way.

“Right,” I said with a smile. Let’s not disturb anything
the bats are used to. I could have teased him, watched the scowl deepen the way
it always did when I called him on one of those. Instead I decided to ask
something I’d always been curious about. “How did you get your hands on it
anyway? Did I leave it in the 89th Street Cat Lair that time after
the Rosenthal Rubies?”

“No, it was in a ventilation duct at the art museum, above
the women’s washroom, third floor, by the Flemish—”

“Oh… yes,” I smiled, and then laughed. “I never did make
it back into the east wing that night, did I?”

“No, you didn’t,” came the booming Bat-gravel. Seeing it
come from Bruce, the memories came flooding in with a new perspective: He was
at the party. Of course. The Foundation must’ve underwritten the new exhibit,
so of course Bruce Wayne was at the party. So of course the director’s door was
locked again, even though she usually forgot when she was staying late for an
event in the galleries instead of leaving at five. So of course the barcodes
had been reset on all the staff badges. So of course the guard changed his
patrol route. So of course the electric eyes were recalibrated. So of course
Batman was in every hallway and gallery ahead of me whenever I found a new vent
to try and crawl out of. I was so pissed at him that night, but now… now
I couldn’t hold back the smile. I couldn’t keep myself from walking over and
kissing him.

“It’s funny,” I laughed. “I know more about the other
stuff in here than where you got my costume. Like that umbrella over there,
with the carved handle. From the Malay Penguin heist, right? Langston Reed’s
answer to the Maltese Falcon.”

“Except it wasn’t fictional. It was presumably the model
for the statue in Dashiell Hammett’s tale, an actual silver gilt,
jewel-encrusted, ebony sculpture, which Reed stubbornly insisted on exhibiting
despite the Penguin being free…”

“I’ve never seen him that mad at anybody who wasn’t a
criminal,” Dick told Alfred after Batman and Robin returned to the cave.

Alfred didn’t think it tactful to say that he wasn’t
surprised, so he simply brought Master Dick a soft drink.

“I mean, I guess the guy was kind of a jerk,” Dick went
on. “Showing off all this high tech security he’s got all over his gallery.
But he did kinda have a point. Penguin doesn’t ‘rule the art world,’ as he put
it. Mr. Reed should be able to exhibit whatever he wants. Just ‘cause it’s a
villain theme.”

Alfred allowed that there was some validity to the point,
but he also knew Langston Reed, a man whose sense of entitlement was so
pronounced, he was the model for aspects of Bruce’s Fop performance. Alfred had
no doubt how Reed would react to Batman coming into his gallery and challenging
his actions. He would become aggressive and obnoxious—and Alfred could guess
how Bruce would respond to that. Recognizing the similarities to Fop Wayne, his
anger would be, as Dick described, on the scale of that reserved for criminal
persons.

All Alfred said to Dick was that a valid point can be
argued well or argued poorly, and perhaps Mr. Reed was not one of
those gifted with the ability to express his views in a convincing manner. He
then went deeper into the cave and made himself conspicuous dusting behind the
workstation, in case Master Bruce wished to unburden himself.

“The idiot is using the same system of lasers and electric
eyes the Shadow Thief beat last month, Alfred. The glass housing Catwoman
slices open with her claws the way you and I turn a doorknob. Microphones
and seismographs to detect disturbances on the floor or in the air, but
cameras he dismisses as overkill. He knows best, the arrogant blowhard.
He doesn’t know how to do anything but write a check to Foster and Forsythe, but
he knows what’s best and all my expertise is waved away.”

“Most distressing, sir. Still, there is an advantage,
surely, in knowing an item the Penguin is certain to try and steal. Forewarned
is forearmed, as they say.”

“Perhaps. But when a target is so obvious, it can work
against us. They know we know what they’re going to do. It becomes part of
their plan, part of their… game.”

The next few days bore out Batman’s prediction. A series
of false alarms at Reed Galleries exasperated the police. Batman traced them to
the hypersensitive microphones and seismographs Reed was so proud of. There was
a theatre next door to the gallery, rehearsing a musical. The noise and
vibrations kept triggering an alert, every false alarm prompted him to set a new
baseline. Once the rehearsals ended, the gallery became too quiet. Noise so
far below the new ambient level could mean that power or ventilation might be
compromised, prompting the system to once again sound an alert. The lynchpin of
Reed’s brilliant security system had been rendered useless by a line of showgirls.

Dick was ready to learn the ins and outs of forensic
accounting, so Bruce assigned him the task looking into the production company
who rented the theatre. It took him less than a day to find Cobblepot’s holding
company among the backers of the ersatz musical. That led to a confrontation
and the bizarre exhortation to “Remember: Never pitch rolls at a bank!” Robin
latched onto Penguin’s parting words and spent all his free time trying to find
an association between coins or coin rolls and the Malay Penguin… or perhaps a
bank and the Penguin... Savings, money, investments, safe deposit boxes, deposit
slips, tellers, on and on with banking and banking terminology.

Batman wasn’t interested in the specifics. He was troubled
by the clue itself. It wasn’t Cobblepot’s style to leave puzzling epigrams. He
was ready to dismiss it as a red herring, but he allowed Robin to continue
simply because some lessons are only learned through trial and error. The price
was hearing Dick murmuring about pitches, rolls and banks while Bruce was trying
to prepare for his upcoming flight to Paris. The board of the International
Securities Exchange was meeting there Friday, and the American delegation was
traveling together on a chartered flight to prepare. The flight was expected to
be as much work as the conference, and he simply couldn’t concentrate with all
of Dick’s speculating:

“He backs the musical to mess up the gallery’s alarms,
right? And the money comes through a bank. The dancers – the ‘chicks’ –
are feathered like birds…”

He was ready to tell Dick to let it go, when a final clue
was dropped—literally dropped, by a flock of birds flying through midtown. The
leaflets were weighted with Double Eagle coins, and all bore an absurd taunt
addressed to Batman:

We need stall no longer! Time
is on the Wing!
Tonight I shall lift the silver bird—and you will take a dive!
Disrespectfully yours,
Penguin.

Refusing to short either Gotham or the Securities Exchange,
Bruce immediately appointed Justin Broome to take his place in Paris. Batman
and Robin suited up, Dick’s triumphant chattering dropping to a background hum
as Bruce’s mind serpentined through the facts of the case. The final thought
snapped into place as he snapped the latch on his utility belt.

“…Just like you always said, Batman, the Penguin’s weak
spot is his vanity! He thinks he can play with us—but we’ve outsmarted him!
Right?”

“Wrong.”

They raced to the airport, to the plane chartered by the
Securities Exchange, and caught the Penguin red-handed, preparing to hijack the
flight and kidnap the sixty most powerful men in the international finance
community.

With Robin clamoring for an explanation in front of a
plane-full of witnesses, Batman couldn’t avoid explaining his reasoning:
Pitch, Roll, and Bank, followed by Stall, Wing, Lift, and
Dive were all flight terms. There was nothing relating to the Malay statue,
not even the bird itself since penguins don’t fly. Tossing out the assumption
that Penguin had any interest in the statue, Batman considered the taunt
literally. A ‘silver bird’ might well mean an airplane, and as targets that
screamed TARGET-TAKE ME went, the passengers of this one flight far outshone any
jeweled statue.

Robin still couldn’t accept that Penguin could pass up
stealing the Malay Penguin…

Bruce stopped narrating, since Selina had apparently been
fighting down a SmileX attack since he described the dancers shorting out Reed’s
security, and since his Right/Wrong exchange with Robin, she was losing the
fight.

So he stood, silently scowling while she got it out of her
system. He noticed the secret alcove was beginning to show since they moved the
long display case with the Mad Hatter’s top hat. The stone “wall” in that one
area was beginning to look discolored, and the patch next to it oddly unsolid.
He knew the effect would become more pronounced as the morning’s work
continued,
until finally the alcove with that secret safe was completely visible. He knew
this would happen, of course, once they started moving cases with the hologram
generators attached to their hinges. He estimated the alcove would not be
visible for more than forty-five minutes, if they continued to work at the pace
he anticipated. If it went longer, he would initiate the DefCon-4 protocols to
lock Alfred and the others out of the cave, but he didn’t want to resort to such
measures unless absolutely necessary.

“I’m sorry,” Selina said, once she got her chuckling under
control. “It’s just… a very different story when you tell it.”

“I take it you’ve heard it before from Cobblepot?”

“Once or twice,” she said with a naughty grin. “Would you
like to hear his version?”

“Every detail.”

Selina tilted her head, deciding where to begin. Finally
she said, “What are the first words out of everybody’s mouth after they hear
‘The Malay Penguin?’ ‘Like the Maltese Falcon,’ right? It was the first thing
I said. Summa cum laude at the Sorbonne and I’d never heard of this
thing. So, first time I heard Ozzy mention ‘The Malay Penguin,’ I asked like
everyone else—”

“Is that anything like the Maltese Falcon?” Bruce nodded.
That was his experience as well, unless you told the listener before they asked,
that would be their first question.

“And the Maltese Falcon, in the novel as well as the movie,
was a fake. Robin was absolutely right, Oswald would never pass up the
chance to get his hands on the actual Malay Peng—”

“I know. The statue at Reed Galleries was a fake that he’d
substituted for the real one before it came into the country. He admitted that
when we caught him, boasted about it. He stole it weeks before, right
after the loan to Reed Galleries was made public, but he cleverly kept the theft
hidden so he could use it as a decoy. It took almost six months to find where
he’d hidden the real bird… You’re laughing again.”

“Bruce, do you really see Oswald waddling around Chatsworth
with a 12-inch statue down his pants, hanging back on the tour and swapping it
out for one on the mantle?”

“You did it?” Batman breathed.

“I had to go to Europe anyway, was overdue for a stop in
Zurich. Why not sweeten the business trip with a little fun. Like we did in
Paris.”

“Hardly the same thing,” he said, a hardness creeping into
his voice from a hundred long-ago rooftops. Normally Selina would have ignored
it, but today, given their task in the cave, it gave her a pang. She offered a
peace offering:

“So I went to this little village called…”

“Hooksiel?” Catwoman asked, more to confirm Oswald’s
handwriting than her pronunciation. She was reading from the slip he’d handed
her, and if he didn’t want her to hock a lover’s saxophone then it must be
Hooksiel…

“In Lower Saxony—kwak!”

If only he’d sit down. She’d offered Cobblepot a seat as
soon as he arrived at the cat lair, but he only sat down for a minute and then he
was up again. Waddling around, scrutinizing each Bast and Sekhmet as if he were
appraising them. It gave the impression that he was distracted, not giving the
conversation his full attention. But Selina knew better. Oswald Cobblepot was
a lot shrewder than most people gave him credit for.

“A charming village. Picturesque—kwak. Not much of
a tourist destination for foreigners, but popular with the locals. Hence, there
is a comfortable hotel should you wish to spend the night. How’s your German?”

“Good enough to meet your…” she squinted at the paper. It
was either Hemp Knight or “Herr Kniphaus…” to peck a flesh birch “…to pick up
your fake bird.”

“A work of art, Catwoman. A forgery so exact, made by a
true genius of the craft, I am assured it will pass the most vigorous visual
inspections. Supplied as he is with all the medieval equipment for caving the
wood, applying silver, and inlaying the gems, Herr Kniphaus assures me the
statue which arrives in Gotham will be indistinguishable from the original—kwak.”

At least, to Mr. Reed’s eyes, Catwoman thought. But
there were too many different materials involved to fool chemical testing,
carbon-14 dating, or the myriad of non-visual techniques to determine
authenticity. Passing a “vigorous visual inspection” might be a great selling
point for a forger in 1902, but today…

“Oswald,” Catwoman purred, “why do I suspect what you
really like about this Kniphaus is that he’s cheap?”

“There is no point in paying for more service than one
needs,” Cobblepot sniffed. “The Malay Penguin remains the property of the Duke
of Devonshire, in whose collection it now resides—kwak! It is merely on
loan to the Reed Gallery for the period of the exhibition, and Mr. Reed will
have no authority to risk damaging it with chemical testing.”

“I suppose,” Catwoman said, biting her lower lip
thoughtfully. The Duke’s country house was called Chatsworth, one of the most
famous in England. Selina had been there twice. The art collection was
so
large, it contained so many old master drawings that could not be put on
display, and a great deal had been sold off in the 1950s when the 10th
Duke died ahead of schedule, producing a £7 million tax bill. The result was
that even the curator didn’t know exactly what the collection contained. The
first time, it was fun: taking a Fragonard that nobody reported stolen because
nobody even knew they had it. The second time, going back for a Tintoretto, it
didn’t seem quite sporting. Besides which, the Dukes of Devonshire all seemed
to lean towards that horsey kind of English gentry that liked dogs in their
pictures rather than taking up a healthy interest in Egyptian artifacts.

So that was her last visit to Chatsworth, but knowing the
house was a great advantage. She knew their security was… well, it was as good
as could be expected for a house built in 1554. They were so limited in what
they could touch, in terms of the physical structure. The installation of
modern wiring, plumbing and heating—without disturbing the historical base—had
provided any number of holes for the modern cat burglar to exploit. And like
all of those historic houses, they were dependent on the revenues from public
tours. All Selina would have to do was pay her £16 admission, and she could
walk through the halls and see if anything had changed. If they’d found a way
to add thermal cameras or motion sensors to make a theft challenging, she might
even pick up a piece or two for herself.

“I’ll do it,” she told Oswald, reaching for a pen and
scribbling a number on his paper. He was standing by a waist-high silver
Sekhmet, running a gloved finger over its ear as if testing for dust. Catwoman
showed him the paper.

“KWAK!” he wailed, stabbing it with a chubby
finger. “You cannot possibly expect me to pay such an amount.”

Hooksiel. Kniphaus. Selina saw
Bruce’s eyes register the information, and while he didn’t actually say thank
you, it was implied in the bat-grunt.

“Then it was off to England. It was
nice seeing Chatsworth again. I waited until the insurance inspectors had
authenticated the bird and saw it safely packed up for shipment to Gotham, then
I made the swap and stashed the original in a cargo bay at Gatwick. Oswald
already had the shipping arranged.”

“I never knew,” Bruce said quietly.

“Naturally, I don’t figure into the
story when Ozzy tells it. He stole the bird weeks before it came into
the country… All the same to me. He stole it, he had it stolen. I got my fee.
He can say whatever he wants. But anyway, the fake bird was on its way
to Gotham, and Oswald knew Reed would push your buttons. He’s so obnoxious.
He’s so certain about everything he says, and so wrong most of the
time. Ozzy knew the more Reed boasted about his wonderful precautions, the more
you would be focused on all the areas where they fell short—and while you were
focused on Reed being wrong, it would keep you focused on the biggest wrong of
all: the idea that the Malay Penguin was his target.”

“Subtle,” Bruce said admiringly. “If he’d left it at that,
it would have worked. But he overplayed his hand with all those extra clues.”

“Didn’t it ever bother you? Oswald leaving you clues like
Riddler? It’s never been his M.O., before or since. Didn’t it make you
wonder?”

“It’s an unanswered question of the case,” Batman graveled,
willing to admit the debit in want of a credit in that particular case log, but
rejecting that word “wonder” that made it sound like he was a poet contemplating the stars.

“Eddie knew a lot about what was going on,” Selina
explained…

“’Lina’s birthday’s coming up,” Eddie told Oswald tersely.
“We made plans to go see that revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Lanced
Cone Elm, she canceled on me. Off to Europe to pull a job!”

“Don’t believe everything you hear about her and Batman,”
Eddie said peevishly.

“Pshaw,” Oswald agreed. “I would not dream of repeating
that prattle of the proletariat…” And he wouldn’t even if he believed it.
Catwoman made it clear that insinuations about her and the Bat would bring an
unsheathing of claws and shredding of Penguin plumage. Quite apart from his
desire to live unbruised, he could tell when a woman was unavailable, even if
she herself seemed blithely unaware of that fact. He himself had made
overtures. And any bird who could resist the charms of Oswald Cobblepot would
clearly not be tempted by inferior specimens like Batman or The Riddler.

“Anyway,” Eddie said, heavy on the dignified hauteur. “I
want to call and wish her a happy birthday. Question: Where to call? Answer:
Unknown. But the query begins “Where,” which rhymes with lair. Who did ‘Lina
say only last week was stopping by her lair?”

Oswald cleared his throat, annoyed by the unnecessary
whimsy in what was clearly becoming a straightforward business transaction: the
Cat’s location in exchange for a wad of cash.

“I figure it must be you that hired her,” Eddie concluded.
“I just want to know where she is.”

Oswald named a price—which Eddie resented. Questions
should be answered based on knowledge and wit. Intelligence was
the currency he valued, not simple cash. But Oswald was firm, so Eddie
grudgingly paid up.

“So Ozzy told him about Hooksiel,
and almost immediately he regretted it. You know what Eddie is like, it’s a
puzzle. What’s Selina doing in Hooksiel? He made it his business to figure
everything out—and Edward Nigma knowing the details of what you’re planning is
never a good thing. There’s no telling what might set him off. FAO Schwarz
puts a giant Hello Kitty in the window and six months of work goes down the
drain because he’s sending you haiku about the Katz collection.

“Oswald figured the best way to avoid the explosion was to
detonate the bomb himself. So he gave you a couple Riddleresque clues himself,
pointing where he wanted them to.”

Bruce’s lip twitched. And Selina grinned.

“It obviously backfired.”

It was a little early to break for lunch, but Bruce didn’t
want to risk Alfred coming down to the cave to prod them while the alcove was
visible. He didn’t say it, but Selina guessed he also wanted to update his
files on the Malay Penguin “in light of new information” (grunt). So she went
upstairs to talk to Alfred about lunch, planned to hang around the kitchen
without making a big deal out of it, giving Bruce time to tweak his logs, and
then bring the sandwiches down herself when they were ready.

To pass the time, she told Alfred about the robbery at
Falconi’s the night before and Bruce’s extraordinary gesture bringing home the
diamond from their first encounter there.

Alfred knew the particulars of that first crime they foiled
together—not because Bruce had ever mentioned it, but because the subject was
raised quite recently when he asked her to take over for him while he was
injured. Alfred did not like admitting he overheard private conversations
between the master and the mistress, so he was quite happy to allow Selina to
tell him the story now. It gave him an alibi, so to speak, for knowing all the
details he did.

“There we were, back in the jewelry store on the very spot
where it all went down all those years ago… I would have settled for a kiss.
Instead, it was that broody bat-silence, you know the one where he’s like a
black hole sucking in light. I didn’t think I’d even get the kiss, and instead…
diamond as big as the Ritz, almost literally in this—Cassie?”

Alfred turned, and Cassie gave her quiet fingertip wave
that made her seem shy if you didn’t know she preferred gestures to speech.

“Case go bad. Last night,” she said. “Thought woman
killed for purse. Find thug use her credit card. Pawn her jewelry. But say no
kill. Say dead already when he find. Believe him. He is right hand. Kill
strike with left hand, and taller like Alfred.”

“Indeed,” Alfred said mildly.

“Turn out she doctor. Office in Gainsly. Lots OCs come
out of Gainly.”

Cassie nodded. “See if police investigate. Or DEA,
anybody. If investigate, maybe have theory who work with, which mob involved.”

“Why not go to Barbara for something like that?” Selina
asked.

“Might not be. All guesswork. If no find police report,
next step research is medical. See about prescriptions writ and filled. If
need do medical research, Sensei better. Sensei father was doctor. Much better
teach.”

Selina smiled. “Well, we’re doing some work downstairs so
you won’t be able to use the cave workstations today, but I’ll send Bruce up and
he can help you from the laptop in the library.”

Predictably, Bruce kicked at the idea. Updating the logs
while Selina brought lunch, now helping Cassie, they were falling behind
schedule. If they didn’t finish in time to recalibrate the holograms before he
left for patrol…

Selina’s response was simplicity itself. “She knows five
street terms for OxyContin, but it’s only one time in three she’ll bother with
‘he’ ‘she’ and ‘is.’”

“You still could have sent her to Barbara. She can learn
as much about human interaction there with Barbara and Dick—”